Anyone heading out to PDC2008 this year?  I will be in attendance with (hopefully!) a new Wiimote project and perhaps a few old ones as well.  More details on that when the project is a tiny bit further.  We will also be giving away a free chapter of our new book “Coding4Fun: 10 .NET Programming Projects for Wiimote, YouTube, World of Warcraft, and More” to lucky PDC attendees at the O'Reilly booth.

I will also be co-presenting a lunch session at PDC:

Title: Coding4Fun: Windows Presentation Foundation Animation, YouTube, iTunes, Twitter, and Nintendo's Wiimote
Date/Time: Tuesday, October 28th, 12:45pm-1:30pm
Speakers: Dan Fernandez, Scott Hanselman, Brian Peek, Clint Rutkas
Room: 403AB
Abstract: Spend time with Coding4Fun authors as they walk through some DIY Development projects: TwitterVote, Wiimote, InnerTube, and BabySmash.

You can add this session to your agenda by visiting the PDC site and searching for “Coding4Fun”.

If anyone will be …

I’ve received information on a few spiffy Wiimote projects using my Managed Wiimote Library in the last couple weeks that everyone should check out…

Wiimote Tracking System Using 3 Wiimotes by Nikolai

This project uses 2 Wiimotes as cameras and a 3rd covered in IR LEDs to create a tracking and gesture recognition system.  Check out the video below.

Wiirtual.Earth - A WPF Virtual Earth 3D Experiment featuring the Nintendo Wiimote by Michael Koester

A pretty spiffy WPF UI integrating Virtual Earth 3D and the Wiimote.  Source code and more information available at the site linked above.

Great projects!

Thanks to everyone that attended my VSLive NY session.  I hope it was informative.  I have posted the slide-decks and source code for both of my sessions so you can tinker with the projects on your own.

• Creating a Simple 2D Game Using XNA Game Studio to Run on a PC, Xbox 360, or Microsoft Zune
• Interfacing External Hardware Using Managed Code

Questions and comments welcome, as always.  Thanks!

Now that we have finished writing the book, we finally have an official title and chapter listing.  Someday we may even have a cover.

The title has morphed into Coding4Fun: 10 .NET Programming Projects for Wiimote, YouTube, World of Warcraft, and More and the final chapter listing (not necessarily in this order) is:

• Alien Attack: Create a 2D clone of Space Invaders with XNA for the PC, Xbox 360, and Zune
• LEGO Soldier: Create an action game using Popfly with a custom-built virtual LEGO character
• World of Warcraft RSS Feed Reader: Use WoW's customizable interface to have feeds pop up while you're gaming
• InnerTube: Download YouTube videos automatically and convert them to a file format for off-line viewing
• PeerCast: Stream video files from any PC
• TwitterVote: Create custom online polls on Twitter
• WHSMail: Build a website with ASP.NET for Windows Home Server that lets you view the messages stored on a computer with Outlook
• "Wiimote" …

I ran into a bit of weirdness yesterday when trying to install SQL Server 2008.  I have Visual Studio 2008 installed as well as a couple of the Visual Studio 2008 Express products (for testing solutions for the Coding4Fun site and the upcoming book).  I installed Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and all went as planned.  After looking at the Help –> About screens, Visual Studio and all of the Express products showed the proper version tag:  9.030729.1 SP1.  So I figured all the products were updated and good to go.

Next I tried to install SQL Server 2008 and got an error stating Rule “Previous releases of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008” failed.  I re-installed SP1 figuring something had gone wrong, but no dice.  After digging through the SQL Server 2008 install logs I realized what was happening.  The installer was using the HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DevDiv\XXX\Servicing\9.0\SP keys to determine if SP1 had been installed and the registry settings were set …